September 10 marked the 10th anniversary of when the Large Hadron Collider first powered on. Since it’s already achieved its most well-known goal—to discover the Higgs boson—you might wonder what else is happening at the famous collider.
This month, Italian physicists will turn on an experiment hunting for a fifth, dark force of nature, the Guardian reports.
Particle physics experiments are huge—they have to be, in order to accelerate particles with enough energy to properly study them. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is nearly 17 miles around, while others are closer to the 2-mile range. But scientists working on a new experiment reported Wednesday that they’ve…
Antimatter continues to behave just like regular matter, no matter what tests scientists throw at it. And in the face of yet another new challenge, antimatter has again refused to crack.
Neutron stars are having a renaissance, as far as space objects go. These ultra-dense collapsed stars are the source of last year’s most important astrophysical discovery, and they could supply the universe with much of its gold and other heavier elements. But, confusingly, many of their most important properties may…
You can feasibly put anything inside the world’s largest physics experiment, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, so long as it can be vaporized. You could even stick a sandwich in there. But for the first time, scientists have accelerated an atomic nucleus with electrons still attached.
A proposed billion-dollar American particle collider has received enthusiastic backing from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, according to a newly released report.
There’s a growing, bewildering movement of folks who reject the most basic learnings of science in favor of conspiracy theories and hocus pocus—as a science journalist, I regularly get emails from people who firmly believe the Earth is flat, as shocking as that may seem. I recently chatted with Brian Cox, host of BBC…
Scientists can’t take pictures of the Higgs boson. But they can find proof of its existence by watching “E=mc2” play out in hundreds of millions of particle collisions per second and detecting how it decays into other particles they do know how to spot. Now, six years after officially discovering the Higgs boson,…
Scientists haven’t conclusively spotted any new particles since the Higgs boson, and that’s got some people worried—there are a ton of other physics puzzles remaining, many of which would require the presence of a new particle to resolve. But recently, there have been some tantalizing clues of new physics, perhaps a…
You might have a pretty rigid understanding of the way stuff should look, at the most basic level. It should have a nucleus that is orbited by electrons. The nucleus should have protons and neutrons, inside each of which reside three quarks.
Today, workers at the world’s largest atom smasher are breaking ground on a performance-enhancing upgrade that will allow scientists to conduct even bigger and better physics experiments.
Neutrinos are ghostly, mysterious shape-shifters. New evidence bolsters the existence of an even ghostlier, “sterile” version of this strange particle.
The search for dark matter—the stuff that seems to make up most of the mass in the Universe, but which is invisible to us—is loaded with new ideas, tantalizing hints, and incredibly advanced experiments. Unfortunately, none of science’s best efforts have yielded any definitive proof of dark matter’s identity.
Science is a field of progress, and in order to keep moving forward, you’ve got to break down a few walls. If you’re in New York on June 6, come join us for our Science Wake: Eulogies for Failed Theories. It’s a part of the Underground Science Festival, an alternative science festival meant to spotlight how science…
When you think of an alien world, you might think of a strange, stormy place with an inhospitable environment, frequent lightning strikes, and extreme radiation. But who needs an imagination when the storms here on Earth already beam radiation, including antimatter, down toward the ground?
You’d be surprised at how many times someone has asked whether the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could collide mundane things, like a sandwich. The answer is, not quite... but almost! It’s sort of a long story, and the explanation might surprise you.
The pressure inside the particles that make up every atom in the universe could be greater than the pressure inside the densest stars, according to a new measurement.
Scientists at Jefferson Lab in Virginia have precisely measured an important and innate property of the ubiquitous proton for the first time, according to a new paper.
Scientists are turning the tuning knob on an experiment that’s essentially a radio receiver inside of a magnet. It’s been around for years, but now it might finally be sensitive enough to hear a whole new kind of particle—one that could explain the mystery of the Universe’s dark matter.
